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She didn’t sleep with scuzzy car guy just because she was desperate for the stability. She slept with him because she’s in a liminal phase.

Liminalty is the scary in-between times in our lives, the weird time when we’re not who we used to be but we’re not quite who we’re going to be. Joan’s in a classic — classic! — liminal phase right now. She’s not the office vixen anymore, but she hasn’t really transitioned to doting mother. And to top it all off, she’s in the middle of a particularly traumatic divorce. Joan doesn’t know who she is anymore; her entire identity is jeopardized.

Can she really become a partner at that firm, a member of the inner circle, with everyone around her knowing just how she got that step up? Joan knows better than anyone there that secrets rarely stay hidden. It seems like a strategic misstep, and so, for this to make sense, I have to believe that Joan’s thinking was not so much pragmatic as a statement of her disgust: a furious response to the news of that closed-room discussion among men she knew—and of course, a way to get into that room. Joan might be a man’s woman, but this felt like a decision to both embrace their opinion and up the ante—to throw herself into the flames, not be thrown.

You know, there’s a moment where Pete is pitching this idea, and he says, « Haven’t we all done something, made a mistake one night for free? » All the men in this office have done sort of off-color things, and acted in ways that we’ve all hissed at throughout the entire series. She acted like one of the guys, to a certain extent. And she’s a single mother. When Lane comes in [with the $50,000 offer] and she says, « It’s four times as much as I make in the entire year »—are you kidding me? How moral are we all? How much can it help my family, and how much can it help my son? And once it’s done, it’s done; it never has to be spoken about again. But it’s a terrible price to pay.

Since I wrote that passionate defense of the NBC series, I’ve tumbled out of bed, grabbed my purse, and taken a long walk of shame. Because—to switch metaphors mid-stream, the way “Smash” does with plots—since its delightful pilot, the show has taken a nosedive so deep I’m surprised my ears haven’t popped. All the caveats I noted but dismissed in my earlier review have become the definingly awful features of “Smash”.

Here’s the wow-quote of the day, from Jeff Gaspin, the head of entertainment at NBC, explaining to The New York Times, with remarkable clarity and certainty, that watching TV shows on-demand is more satisfying than watching them live.

« The commercials broke the tension … I hate to say this to the AMC executives and everybody else in the business, but I will never watch ‘Walking Dead’ live again. »

For one thing, he’s willing to unambiguously talk about his sexual orientation. His eight-month role in Angels was both “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done as an actor and the most rewarding” he says. Having to inhabit that terrible lost world, if only in his mind, took a toll. “And at the same time, as a gay man, it made me feel like there’s still so much work to be done, and there’s still so many things that need to be looked at and addressed.”